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9/30/2022 10:59 am  #1


Space is Big

Josh Worth has created an accurate scale digital map of our Solar system.
For a scale he chose Earth’s Moon (2159 mile dia.) to be 1 pixel.
The map scrolls horizontally and being accurate it’s a lot of scrolling on empty space.
Along the way he adds facts and fantasies. I pictured Major Tom talking to himself.
 
SPACE be BIG
Just our solar system is mind boggling starting with the Sun, 24,432,349 buses, 10,262,233 Blue Whales,
34.5 Great Walls of China, or 865,370 miles in diameter.
From the sun ...
17,000,000 miles  Pretty empty out here
28,700,000 miles  Here comes the first planet
36,000,000 miles  Mercury, 3.2 light minutes, 4,549 earths, 4,464,611,678 buses, 1,875,255,046 Blue Whales,
                                              or 6,356 Great Walls of China from the Sun
45,000,000 miles  Turns out things are pretty far apart
58,000,000 miles  Sit tight, a new planet soon
67,300,000 miles  Venus, 6 light minutes, 8,529 earths, 8,619,985,841, Busses, 3,620,622,153 Blue Whales,
                                          or 12,271 Great Walls of China from the Sun
73,000,000 miles  Most of space is just space
80,230,000 miles  Half way home
93,000,000 miles  Earth, 8.3 light minutes, 11,753.2 earths, 11,878,367,513 buses, 4,989,228,677 Blue Whales,
                                         or 16,909 Great Walls of China from the Sun
                               And another 239,000 miles to the Moon which is 2159 miles in diameter
105,000,000 miles  Next stop Mars
120,000,000 miles  It would take about 7 months to fly this far in a spaceship
                                Better be some good in flight entertainment
                                You'd need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours.
141,711,700 miles  Mars, 12.7 light minutes, 17,908 earths, 18,099,075,431 Buses, 7,602,090,613 Blue
                                           Whales, or 25,765 Great Walls of China from the Sun
145,400,000 miles  Relax because Jupiter is 3 times as far
173,000,000 miles  Are we there yet?
216,000,000 miles  Seriously, when are we going to be there?
260,000,000 miles  This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up.
                                Too bad they're all too small to appear on this map.
281,000,000 miles  I spy, with my little eye... black
303,000,000 miles  A road trip, at 75 mph, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth.
367,344,000 miles  Remember these distances are averages, the distance between 2 planets depends on where
                                they are in their orbits around the Sun. So if you’re planning a trip to Jupiter you might
                                want to use another map.
389,000,000 miles  If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets.
                                New Horizons space craft launched in 2006 only took 13 months to get to Jupiter.
432,000,000 miles  Pretty close to Jupiter now.
465,000,000 miles  Sorry. That was a lie. Now we really are pretty close.
483,753,000 miles  Jupiter, 43.3 light minutes, 61,133 earths, 61,784,332,439 Buses, 25,951,054,542 Blue
                                             Whales, or 87,952 Great Walls Of China, from the Sun.
                                Jupiter’s moons, IO, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
529,000,000 miles  Lots of time to think out here...
621,365,527 miles  Pop the champagne for 1 billion km!
659,000,000 miles  I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren't drawn to scale. 
                                It's not hard to draw the planets, it's the empty space that's a problem.
696,000,000 miles  Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space.
754,000,000 miles  We're used to dealing with things at a much smaller scale than this.
812,000,000 miles  When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the
                                national debt... those things are too much for our brains to handle.
890,340,000 miles  Saturn, 79.7 light minutes, 112,637 earths, 113,836,814,200 Buses, 47,814,474,279 Blue
                                             Whales, or 162,050 Great Walls of China from the Sun.
                                Saturn’s moon Titan
929,185,000 miles   Need to reduce things so we can see or experience directly to understand them.
987,186,000 miles   We're always coming up with metaphors for big numbers, but they never seem to work.
1,045,460,355 miles  Let's try a few metaphors anyway...
1,104,100,000 miles  You’d need 933 of these screens side-by-side to show this whole map at once.
1,163,000,000 miles  Print this map on a quality printer (300 pixels per inch) the earth would be invisible,
                                   and the paper would be 475 feet wide, or about 1½ football fields.
1.221,000,000 miles  Even though we don’t really understand them, a lot can happen within these massive
                                   lengths of time and space. A drop of water can carve out a canyon. An amoeba can
                                   become a dolphin. A star can collapse on itself.
1,279,221,000 miles  It’s easy to disregard nothingness because there’s no thought available to encapsulate it.
                                  There’s no metaphor that fits because, by because, by definition, once the nothingness
                                   becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.
1,337,321,000 miles  It’s a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise we’d have no point of
                                   reference. We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand.
1,396,000,000 miles  All this emptiness could drive you nuts. Like in a sensory deprivation tank too long,
                                   your brain starts to make things up. You see and hear things that aren’t there.
1,453,000,000 miles  The brain isn't built to handle "empty."
1,512,503,000 miles  "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the
                                   parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy.
                                   Didn’t have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."
1,571,000,000 miles  Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size, and energy
                                   of a few select wavelengths. For everything else, we have to make up mental models
                                   and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real.
1,629,000,000 miles  The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to
                                   make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying.
1,688,000,000 miles  When you hear people talk about how, "there’s more to this universe than our minds
                                   can conceive of" it's usually a way to get you to go along with a half-baked plot point
                                   about UFOs or super-powers in a sci-fi series that you're watching late at night when
                                   you can’t get to sleep.
1,746,000,000 miles  Even when Shakespeare wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
                                   Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – he's basically trying to give us a loophole to
                                   make the ghost in the story more believable.
1,787,777,865 miles  Uranus, 160 light minutes, 225,925 earths, 228,330,661,375 Buses, 95,904,919,793 Blue
                                                 Whales, or 325,036 Great Walls of China from the Sun.
1,858,000,000 miles  But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds
                                   can conceive of. The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice.
1.920,000,000 miles  You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot. Everything in between is
                                    inconsequential and fairly boring.
1,979,000,000 miles  Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958%
                                   of the known universe.
2,036,000,000 miles  Even an atom is mostly empty space.
2,095,000,000 miles  If the proton of a hydrogen atom was the size of the sun on this map, we would need 11
                                   more of these maps to show the average distance to the electron.
2,153,000,000 miles  Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that
                                   nothing can truly be empty... but c’mon, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us.
2,211,000,000 miles  You could safely say the universe is a "whole lotta nothing."
2,270,000,000 miles  If so much of the universe is emptiness, what does that mean to people like us, living on
                                   a tiny speck in the middle of all of it?
2,327,000,000 miles  Is the known universe 99.9999999999999999999958% empty?
                                   Or is it 0.0000000000000000000042% full?
2,387,000,000 miles  With so much emptiness, aren't stars, planets, and people just glitches in an otherwise
                                   elegant and uniform nothingness, like pieces of lint on a black sweater?
2,445,000,000 miles  But without the tiny dots for it to stretch between, there would be no emptiness to
                                    measure, and for that matter, no one around to measure it.
2,503,000,000 miles  You might say that so much emptiness makes the tiny bits of matter that much more
                                   meaningful - simply by the fact that, against all odds, they aren't empty. If you're
                                   drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal.
2,561,000,000 miles  What if trillions of stars and planets were crammed right next to each other? They
                                   wouldn't be special at all.
2,620,000,000 miles  Seems we’re pathetically insignificant, and miraculously important at the same time.
2,678,000,000 miles  Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive
                                   void between them depends on who you are, who you are, and how your brain chemistry
                                   is balanced at a particular moment. We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of
                                   the universe inside of us.
2,737,000,000 miles  It's reassuring to know that no matter how depressingly bleak or ridiculously momentous
                                   we feel, the universe, judging by its current structure, seems well aware of both extremes.
2,798,315,818 miles  Neptune, 250.4 light minutes, 353,628 earths, 357,394,122,562 Buses, 150,114,988,730
                                                    Blue Whales, or 508,761 Great Walls of China from the Sun.
3,348,000,000 miles  Congratulations on making it this far.
3,672,000,000 miles  Might as well stop now.
                                   We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else.
And this has been just our pissant solar system in a giant universe.
 
https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html


 Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose.
 
 

9/30/2022 1:05 pm  #2


Re: Space is Big

Yeah.  That's a well done site.

 

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